The one behind Jackie Kennedy's pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat is of resilience, says Natalie Portman, who mesmerizes as the former first lady in biopic Jackie (now playing in New York and Los Angeles).

Kennedy was photographed wearing the outfit while disembarking Air Force One with husband President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, an hour before he was assassinated in a motorcade by Lee Harvey Oswald on Nov. 22, 1963. The first lady sat with her husband when he was shot three times, and she cradled his head in her lap shortly before he died.

“It’s crazy when clothes become symbols, and when you see something so recognizable and iconic,” Portman tells USA TODAY of the ensemble. “It tells a whole story, just the dress, itself. And then, of course, with the blood on it … (it) has the sort of history of America in it.”

The first scene Portman shot in Kennedy's iconic pink suit was her return to the White House after JFK's assassination.(Photo: Pablo Larrain / Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation)

As depicted in Pablo Larraín's movie, Kennedy refused to take off her blood-stained suit in the hours after JFK's assassination, telling "Lady Bird" Johnson, "I want them to see what they have done to Jack."

The very first scene Portman shot in the pink costume was when the first lady finally arrives back at the White House and takes it off, a moment that the actress finds telling.

“It’s really impressive that somebody who was going through something so personally awful and traumatic and terrifying had the presence of mind to understand that it was not only her grief, but also the whole nation’s,” Portman says. “Symbolically, she had to represent something to them and present an image that would make an impact. It seems that the natural instinct would be to get out of that immediately – to get clean, to wipe your husband’s blood off of you. But for her to insist that it stayed on showed this real awareness of public image.”

Jackie Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy watch the casket of her slain husband placed in an ambulance at Andrews Air Force Base on Nov. 22, 1963.(Photo: Associated Press)

Jackie opens in Washington, San Francisco, Phoenix and Boston on Friday, and expands to more theaters nationwide through January. Learn more about how Portman recreated Kennedy's accent and other iconic moments in her chat with USA TODAY.